Rushworth Festival of the Birds - Easter 2007
The historic town of Rushworth with its population of 1000, is nestled within the largest Box Ironbark forest in the world. This forest supports local community enterprise and has done since the gold-rush era of the mid 1800s. Amidst Eucalyptus oil production, timber harvesting and alluvial mining, the forest also supports a diverse population of bird and animal species, dependant on the variation of plant species which make up the Box Ironbark ecosystem.
The Rushworth Festival of the Birds aims to celebrate the diversity of the bird species (over 200 species) of the Box Ironbark forest in order to educate and raise awareness of the complexity and sensitivity of the environment that surrounds us.
Our aim, among various practical forms of education, is to appeal to the basic human love of birds and to use this appreciation as a stepping stone of understanding to the complex web of life that exists within any natural environment.
Easter of 2006 was our first festival to celebrate a healthy respect for the environment at our back door. The key to our environmental component of the festival was to encourage community conversations about birds. We set about talking to a wide variety of community groups ranging from the kindergarten to the senior citizens.
These meetings gave us the opportunity to present a display of bird’s nests, images and props to invite community participation.
Over 2000 people attended the Easter Saturday Festival & Market.
This approach was very successful and we had a fantastic response to our bird nest exhibition. There was an overwhelming response to the guest speaker from the Bird Observer’s Club of Victoria and all of our community art projects.
The art projects evolved around a way to celebrate and visualise the story of the bush.
In our case they took the form of a giant puppet play.
This was a great way to involve the whole community and educate school groups who adopted the festival as part of their curriculum.
The next Festival of the Birds will also be a combination of environmental and artistic collaboration.
We aim to expand on the exhibition and guest speaker concept (as it was such a success) and invite several guest speakers to talk on various aspects of the natural environment. Eg. Birds, Bats, Insects, Ecosystems etc.
We also plan to run a series of fieldtrips into the forest for a range of abilities and supplemented by snacks of bush tucker and bush history stories so that individuals can experience a first hand taste of the wonder of the Australian bush.
Community workshops will be run through the Rushworth Community House and will take the form of nesting box construction and implementation.
Key features of the Birds Festival is that it is not just a one-off event. It is staged over a number of weeks leading up to a festival finale at Easter. Local people with practical experience in the bush are engaged in talks and workshops, which are taken to the community and held as part of other community events and meetings rather than as separate exercises. Additionally, our vision is for this to be an annual focal event for the town, local community (including businesses), visitors and tourists.
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